School Writing Workshop: Moon Trees

This story, written during an artist residency in Edmonton Alberta, is near and dear to my heart for several reasons. When I first heard about the true story of moon trees I was immediately fascinated, and I thought this would be a great story to explore with the grade 2/3 students at my artist residency at Brander Gardens School.

We started off by brainstorming as many ideas for the trees as possible, and then we collectively decided which ones would make it into the story. The students then helped me decide what the illustrations would look like while I sketched out their ideas. Personally, I think the illustrations turned out great.

Originally I was against the ideas of the breakdancing trees, but choosing to keep them or not turned out to a very important decision, as it marked to what extent I was writing stories with the students’ help, and to what extent the students were writing stories with me as a guide. We obviously chose to keep the breakdancing trees, and I’m glad we did. It was a wonderful moment of letting go of my own idea of how a story should go, and I’ve come to embrace the chaotic creativity of the students’ minds.

School Writing Workshop: The Amazing Tube

‘The Amazing Tube’, written the Brander Garden School’s grade 3 students during an artist residency.

For this class I brought in a box of empty toilet paper tubes and told the kids to come up with as many things to do with them as possible. Over the course of the two week artist residency I saw this class for 4 sessions (3 hours total), and we spent the rest of our time consolidating everyone’s ideas, developing the characters, and deciding what each page will look like.

My original idea for the ending was that the characters would go to a friends’ birthday, and get them an empty paper tube of their own. The students came up with this much cleaner ending.

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For more information about elementary school writing workshops in the Edmonton area, click here.

School Writing Workshop: The Last Page

Last month I did a series of writing workshops with elementary students at a local Edmonton School during a 2-week artist residency. Throughout my visit, each class created a different story, collectively ending up with a series of 11 fully illustrated stories.

One my my favourite stories (actually, they’re all my favourites), is this one written with one of the grade 6 classes. Scroll down to read a bit of the backstory ad see why I love this on so much.

Last year I did a few writing workshops at this same school, where the students and I came up with an outline for a story, including introduction, the plot points, and the ending, and then I illustrate one page for the story. One story which has become somewhat legendary was Pancake vs Waffle, a story about two breakfast foods competing to see who is the best while making a big mess of themselves (and the kitchen) in the process. The page I illustrated featured pancake and waffle racing around the kitchen riding on cats. In the end, the family comes down for breakfast, and when they see pancake and waffle they say ‘Eww, we’ll just have crepes”.

For this residency, I gave this class the honour of writing the last story for the collection, and I thought it would be a cool meta thing to call it ‘The Last Page’. Other than the title, I had no other prompts for the students. Little did I realize that we would eventually end up paying homage to a piece of the school’s history, and writing a story about two siblings writing the story of Pancake vs Waffle.

This is what I love about doing these workshops; when I showed up last year, I never would have dreamed that I’d be drawing a pancake and a waffle riding cats, and when I showed up this year, I never would of guessed that I’d be seeing pancake and waffle yet again.

For more information about school writing workshops in the Edmonton area (and beyond), click here.

My First Colouring Wall

I was recently commissioned to make a colouring wall for the Calgary and Edmonton Renovation shows.

I loved the idea of creating a piece of art that would ultimately become a collaborative, interactive art project for kids, a piece that would evolve as people added their contributions.

Since it was for a renovation show, I came up with a colouring wall design of a messy workbench fill with tools, toys, and trinkets (partly inspired by my own workbench).

The biggest challenge was dealing with the size of the illustration. It was to be 4 ft x 8ft. A large illustration like this really slows down my drawing app, and greatly reduces the namer of layers I can create. I ended up making the sketch at a smaller size, and then doing the final illustration in two parts.

Another challenge was coming up with all of the things to add to the bench. I wanted there to be a lot of little things for kids to colour. I started with the tools, and then slowly filled in the spaces in between (a few of my favourite things I added are the treehouse illustration, Fischer Price toys, stickers, bird poster, and the stegosaurus).

I absolutely loved seeing kids interacting with the wall and seeing the collaborative transformation of the piece.

If you’re interested in creating an interactive art project for your event, I encourage you to consider a colouring wall. It is a fun and rewarding way to bring an audience together. And if you have questions about the creative process, or would like to commission a piece from me, feel free to use the contact page to get in touch!